


second step

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, season 2 vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 23:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6929551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first step is the one that reminds her that she is alive. The first step was her first year with Mulder, caught up in the excitement of it all. The second step is harder - but, she reminds herself, the second step is worth it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	second step

**Author's Note:**

> basically i like s2 a lot.
> 
> warning for discussion of many of s2's traumatic storylines (pfaster, the like)
> 
> (originally posted here: http://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/144714046408/x-files-fic-second-step)

**1.**

The first time is on a plane back from Puerto Rico, and he dozes with his head leaned back. Scully plays solitaire on the pull-out tray, and watches him sleep with one eye. She misses their office, his files and theories. She would never straight up tell him this, but she’d had more fun in the X-Files division then in any other assignments she’d had at the bureau. He’d made the grim work bearable, with his theories and bad jokes and easy affection towards her. An arm around her as he cleaned his glasses, his hand on her cheek after her father died, his fingers electricity against the small of her back.

She draws a card from the slush pile. Mulder’s hand comes down on the uncovered card. “There’s your ace,” he says.

She smiles tentatively at him. “Want me to deal you in?”

“Not solitaire.”

They play poker over the armrest dividing their seats as the sun arcs over their small plane.

The second time is on a park bench where they’ve met before. Mulder pulls a beat-up deck of cards out of his coat pocket and teaches her blackjack under a street lamp. When he turns to walk away, he steps too close to the manhole and Scully calls after him to watch out for the Flukeman.

The third time is over the phone, because he always calls her late at night. They talk for about ten minutes before there is nothing else to say. They listen to each other’s breaths for another minute before Mulder asks her, “Do you have any cards, Scully?” She deals two hands of Go Fish.

“Do you have any aces?” he says into the phone.

“Go Fish.” She draws a 10 of clubs and sets it with his cards.

“Okay, um. Do I have any kings?”

“You do, but that wasn’t what I was going to ask. I was going to ask if you had any sevens.” She pulls a seven off of his stack.

“I think you have some sort of unfair advantage here, Scully,” Mulder says, and she laughs as she deals a new hand.

The fourth time, she misses the entire game. Mulder can’t sleep on his third night without her, so he splays out a game of solitaire on his coffee table, and draws an ace from the slush pile. He stares at it for a solid minute before laying it back down and stretching out on his couch. He’ll wait for her to come back to finish it. He wants to go to her house, wants something that smells like her, but Mrs. Scully is still sleeping there, still terrified about the fate of her daughter, and he can’t. He fingers her cross around his neck.

The sixth time, she is in a hospital, wearing her cross, with his videotape glaring up at him from the bedside table. She called him, and asked for him to come. “Bring cards,” she said. They play Bullshit on her bed. Mulder looks back at the door every few minutes, as if Mrs. Scully was going to roar through the door and scold them for cursing. She is a terrible liar, and he is not. His hand runs out first, and Scully grins at him from behind fanned-out cards. “You win,” she says.

_And you lose_ , he thinks. She looks smaller in a hospital gown. He tries to apologize for everything. She shuffles, cards sliding effortlessly through her fingers, and deals him another hand.

**2.**

Her family hovers at Thanksgiving. Her mother doesn’t seem to think she’s well enough yet, because she sits her down on the couch and drapes her in blankets, ordering her to rest until dinner. Bill seems to think she went back to work too soon, and asks how her partner could let her return. “He didn’t want me to,” she explains.

Melissa sits on the couch with her, and they talk the way they used to when they were kids, legs pulled up to their chest. Melissa tugs part of the knit blanket over on her lap and grins mischievously. “Mulder’s a piece of work,” she says.

Scully blinks. “What do you mean by that?”

Missy shrugs. “Nothing. He cares a lot about you.”

She doesn’t need to ask Melissa’s meaning. She’d read the file on her abduction, on Duane Barry. He’d been close to finding her. Had he been there before it all went black and foggy? Had he seen her?  How close had he come before the light took it all away? Sometimes, when she relives it in her nightmares, she thinks she hears his voice, and she’ll wake up with her arm spread out across the bed. Reaching for him.

Dinner is awkward, because her father is dead and she had almost followed. She doesn’t bother to ask whether or not Charlie could make it. It’s nice to eat with the remainder of her family, but it would be nicer if they didn’t give her nervous, pitying looks. She is trying to put this all behind her.

She calls Mulder from her mother’s bedroom in between dinner and dessert, almost feeling like a teenager again. “Hello,” he answers.

Scully suddenly remembers the date, and has a rush of embarrassment. “Hi,” she says. “It’s me. I’m sorry, Mulder, I don’t want to bother you today.”

“Hi, Scully,” he says, sounding almost excited. “It’s no bother. I wasn’t doing anything anyway.”

Scully knows virtually nothing about Mulder’s relationship with his parents, and doesn’t want to ask. _It tore the family apart,_ he’d said of his sister’s abduction. Will hers, she wonders.

“So, did you need anything?” he asks politely.

She searches her mind for a good excuse for calling him, and finds one that she likes immediately. “I was wondering if we had any cases coming up.”

“Well, there is one, actually. A kidnapping case in Wisconsin…”

She leans back against her mother’s pillows and lets Mulder’s soft voice explain to her about the case, already feeling her slight anxiety drain away.

**3.**

He’s amused about what happened outside the restaurant. “Little wife, huh?” he teases, tugging at a loose strand of hair.

Scully rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, don’t pop out the diamond ring just yet, Mulder.”

It’s nice to be on a case with him again - the familiar back-and-forth, the whisper about monsters or spirits - everything she’d missed through every class she’d taught at Quantico, every autopsy she’d done. She’d watch him leave the morgue and consider following him. She missed her spot beside him in the field, in the passenger seat of the car. (Although she’s considering fighting him for driving rights.)

Mulder pouts a little as he guides the car around a curve. “You wouldn’t want to marry me?”

“Just considering how we do on a case alone, I’d say a marriage with the two of us would be pretty ridiculous,” she replies. The thought is alien - despite her mother’s inquiries, she hasn’t thought about marriage since she entered the Bureau, and it’d been a scarce subject since medical school. (Since Daniel, really, seeing how easy a marriage could break…) But for a second, she imagines it. Mulder’s toothbrush next to hers on the bathroom counter, Mulder’s things cluttering up the living room, the gurgle of Mulder’s fish tank in her ears, Mulder in her bed…

He shrugs as he parks at the hotel. “Well, I mean, if we ever _did_ get married, you’d have to remember iced tea instead of root beer.”

She grins at him as she yanks the door open. “In your dreams.”

“Hey, we never did finish dinner.” Mulder gestures to the takeout boxes in the backseat. “We could catch a movie on TV.”

“Sure,” she says agreeably. (It’s almost a relief - she hasn’t slept well in months.

4.

“Scully, wait,” he says as she starts to push open the door of her hotel room.

“I’m fine,” she repeats, not wanting to recreate the scene from Pfaster’s house. She’s still slightly embarrassed, even if Mulder’s arms around her, holding her up, had been comforting.

“Scully,” he says again. He reaches out to touch her, but stops. “I-I don’t know that I’m ready to leave you.”

Their eyes meet. His are wide in the dim light of the motel breezeway, and she suddenly remembers that he’d watched her taken twice.

“Okay.”

“I mean-” he starts, stops. “We don’t have to…”

“There’s two beds,” she says. “It’s fine.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. I’m going to, uh, go to my room and get some clothes, okay?”

Scully nods, turns away, slips her key into the lock and shoves the door open. The room is dark, and she grasps for the light until her fingers curl around it. She is tired of being in the shadows tonight.

She’s in the bathroom before Mulder gets back to the room. Scully’s halfway convinced herself that she will feel better after a hot shower, because that sort of thing has always worked before, but as soon as her hand comes in the vicinity of the faucet, she is backed up against the wall, shaking, Pfaster’s voice echoing in her head. She curls her fingers inward in an attempt to make the echoes stop, but they won’t. She can’t get near the tub. Her heart is pounding.

“Scully?” he calls from the other room. “You okay?”

She shoves the door open with both hands. “I’m fine,” she repeats, not meeting his eyes, holding her breath so she doesn’t see she is lying. She grabs a shirt and pants, and heads back into the bathroom to change. She doesn’t realize the shirt is Mulder’s until she pulls it over her head and catches his scent. Any other time, she might be embarrassed, but at the moment, she doesn’t care because it’s large on her, large enough that the sleeves fall over her hands and hide her bruised wrists. It smells familiar, too, a smell she didn’t even know she would recognize until it engulfs her. She breathes out.

“Scully?” he asks again as she exits the bathroom.

She doesn’t answered the unasked question ( _are you okay_ ), but instead moves closer to him, burying her face against the hollow of his collarbone. His arms come up and around her almost automatically. _I will be,_ she thinks, curling her hand into his t-shirt. _I will be._

* * *

He can’t sleep, so he sits up and writes his way out, the way he always has after a jarring case. Profiling teaches you habits to rid yourself of the images behind your eyelids, but he has no doubt he’ll be thinking of this one for some time. He keeps one hand poised to flick the computer off at a moment’s notice in case she wakes up.

She sleeps restlessly on the bed, on top of the covers. Her pants cuffs are shoved up, and he can see the bruises on her ankles, the contusions around her mouth. She whimpers slightly in her sleep, and he wants to pull her up into his arms. He doesn’t dare touch her. He thinks it might make it worse.

He types his way out, to keep the images of a dead and mutilated Scully out of his head. He dozes off with his head against the table at one point, and wakes up stifling a shout. _She’s okay. She’s okay._

_You are handling this well,_ he tells himself. _You are not chasing men down with guns. You are not strangling suspects. You are doing much better._ But the last time she’d been taken, he hadn’t been sure she was all right, hadn’t had the chance to hold her and reassure himself that she was solid and real, and although traumatized, physically unharmed.

She has a more violent nightmare later, murmuring _no no_ into her pillow as she shakes wildly. He doesn’t know whether to touch her, so he just whispers, “Scully, wake up, it’s okay, you’re safe.” She gasps for breath a little as her eyes fly open, and she stares unseeing for a minute. “Thank you,” she whispers, fingers brushing over his wrist, before pulling the covers almost over her head and closing her eyes again.

Mulder almost calls her _Dana,_ but that’s not their thing. Not anymore. She can’t call him Fox, he can’t call her Dana. He moves back to his chair, and tries not to watch her. Instead, he watches the door, Pfaster in police custody or not.

* * *

“I think we should get out of here,” he says. “Who knows who else in this town is associated with summoning demons?”

Her hair is dripping down her back, and her hands are still slick with shower water. Rope burns, again, on both of them this time. “Good idea,” she answers. “We can just go by the hotel and get our things.”

The storm’s still going, which doesn’t help the whole soaking wet situation. Mulder settles into his normal spot in the driver’s seat, while Scully settles into the passenger side. She shivers and wraps her arms around her. She can still feel the water, still hear the Latin chants, still see the blankness in the man’s eyes as he shot himself. And the chalkboard, God, the chalkboard, and Paddock’s disappearance. She’ll let Mulder do this case report because she doesn’t think she can explain this one.

They get to the hotel in a record amount of time, and Mulder looks over at her. “Scully, you’re shaking.”

“Chilly,” she says, clenching her jaw so that her teeth do not chatter.

His hand brushes her forehead, as if checking for a fever. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says.

Mulder looks at her with unabashed worry. “I was trying to save you,” he murmurs. “When I rolled on top of you.”

Oh. Scully grabs his hand and squeezes it gratefully. She images Mulder’s dead weight falling on top of her, the smell of his blood, that brief moment of grief and horror before it would be her turn. They’ve both been hurt this time. “Maybe we can stay here,” she says. “You can stay in my room again, if you want.”

He nods. He looks worn out, really, circles under his eyes, washed out by the frigid waters of a gym shower. “You sleep,” she adds, squeezing his hand. “It’s okay. I keep my gun by the bedside table.”

Mulder smiles, only a little bit, and presses a kiss to her hair. (It scares a little that this routine is familiar, but they survived. They’re both okay.)

* * *

“Are you hurt?” he asks, peeling the tape from her mouth. She shakes her head. His fingers brush a strand of hair from her forehead, and she stares up at him with wide, grateful eyes. They crawl over to the cooling body, and she watches as Mulder removes the mask. The sheriff.

“I guess there was no way that the sheriff wouldn’t know about it,” she says, trying to iron the fear and stress out of her voice. She just almost died - again. This is getting ridiculous. Her head is pounding.

Mulder turns to face her, unraveling the tape around her wrist. “Scully,” he says, and stops. She flexes her wrists gratefully and looks down at the ground. Here it goes again, their awkward dance of him trying to be fragile with her, and her pulling away because she needs to keep up the mantra of Strong FBI Agent, because if she doesn’t, she’ll crumble.

He takes her arms and helps her gently to her feet. She surprises him by leaning in. He wraps both arms around her gratefully, breathing a sigh of relief into her hair. “You okay?” he asks again.

“Mm-hmm,” she mutters into his shirtfront. “I just want to get out of here.” She scans the area quickly for any signs of the townspeople - because really, they’re outnumbered, and Mulder will run out of rounds long before he’ll run out of people. Her spine crawls with lessening terror.

One thing Scully has learned in recent months is that it’s easier to get up then to keep going. The first step is always the hardest - bullshit. The first step is the one that reminds her that she is alive. The first step was her first year with Mulder, caught up in the excitement of it all. The second step is harder - but, she reminds herself, the second step is worth it. She thinks. She hopes so.

Mulder keeps a hand on her arm to steady her as they walk towards the car.

**5.**

She saves him more times than he could’ve ever imagined. Her hand branding his neck on Harry Cokely’s dirty floor. Her hands pushing the last of the water to him on a boat rocked by the sea. Her voice breaking through the barrier as he dies with ice in his veins, her smile the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes. He’d been sinking, before. She was supposed to be a weight, but she’d become his life preserver, a hand to pull him back from the edge of the cliff.

He tried not to want her back for selfish reasons, but it wasn’t his fault that her cross in the hollow of his collarbone wasn’t enough. When he heard her screams on his answering machine, all he could think was that it was impossible that he would never see her again. She was enthusiastic at first, still thought she could save the world. Her eyes were brighter than he’d ever cared to notice. He missed talking to her, missed her voice in his ear. The thought of anyone hurting her was impossible, the thought of her death a taboo, a forbidden thing. He’d caught a glimpse of a world he never wanted to see the other side of, one without her, one where he couldn’t save her. He regretted the things that had happened with Samantha, but he couldn’t regret trading his sister for her. Not Scully.

He really tries not to be selfish with her, but it all feels selfish at this point. Every look, every touch, every case that throws her into danger. He tells jokes as much as he can get away with it. He loves to make her smile.

**6.**

“You’ll be careful, right?” she asks from the doorway. She isn’t sure why she isn’t going - she should be going. But still, she doesn’t move.

“Of course,” Mulder says absently. “Careful is my middle name.”

“What about your shoulder?”

“It feels fine.” He starts off after Hosteen’s grandson, a silhouette against the bright glare of the desert.

Guilt twists in Scully’s stomach for the first time since he hit the ground. “Mulder!” she calls. He turns mid-step, the second one, and gives her a questioning look. “Um, I’m sorry I shot you,” she says quietly, strangely scared of his answer.

When he smiles, something releases inside her. “True friends shoot each other when they need it, Scully,” he says. “You saved me. Again.”

_You saved me,_ she thinks, twisting the gold chain around her neck as she watches him go.


End file.
